Source: Pacific Council Teleconference

The Obama administration has completed a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) that reduces the role and number of U.S. nuclear weapons. Those reductions are in line with the limits set out in the recently signed new START arms control treaty. The new Nuclear Posture Review identifies nuclear terrorism as the principal threat to the United States. In a teleconference discussion hosted by Pacific Council, Carnegie’s George Perkovich explored the significance of these events.

Nuclear Terrorism

• Perkovich noted that nuclear terrorism is “one of the easiest problems to redress because the number of actors you have to mobilize” to secure weapons-usable materials “is relatively small.”

Reducing the Role of Nuclear Weapons

• Advances in targeting and information technology have made it possible to use precision conventional weapons for missions previously assigned to nuclear weapons. “The politics are just catching up” to these military innovations, Perkovich said.

Addressing China

• Perkovich said the NPR’s approach to China was perhaps its “most important” yet unsung innovation. The NPR acknowledges, albeit in “very indirect language,” that China and the United States are mutually vulnerable to each other’s nuclear weapons, much in the way the United States and Russia continue to be since the days of the Cold War.


• If the strategic relationship between the two countries is to remain stable, the United States will have to convince China that it will not seek missile defenses “large and capable” enough to remove China’s ability to retaliate to an American nuclear attack, Perkovich said.

Will Iran build nuclear weapons?

• Perkovich said the answer hinges on whether Iran opts for a “Japan strategy,” in which Iran retains the capability to develop nuclear weapons but stops short of doing so, or a “Pakistan strategy” in which Iran rushes to build a nuclear weapon as soon as it is technically able.